A former federal court judge who spent much of his career in Tucson has died.
Retired U.S. District Judge Alfredo Marquez died on Aug. 27. He was 92.
A native of Winkelman, Marquez joined the Navy in 1941 and worked as a flight instructor in Texas during World War II. He later attended the University of Arizona on the GI Bill.
Marquez earned economics and law degrees from the UA. He served as an assistant Arizona attorney general and in 1952 joined the Pima County Attorney’s Office as a prosecutor.
Morris K. Udall, who later would represent Southern Arizona in Congress, was Pima county attorney at the time.
President Jimmy Carter appointed Marquez to the federal judiciary in 1980.
Friends and colleagues said Marquez carried a strong sense of right and wrong, which was apparent in his judicial philosophy.
“He could be very sympathetic to those who deserved sympathy but could be strict with those who deserved that,” Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild said.
Rothschild worked as Marquez’s clerk on the federal bench in the early 1980s, shortly after completing law school.
Marquez also was a founding partner with Rothschild’s father in 1957 in the law firm that still bears the mayor’s family name: Mesch, Clark and Rothschild.
Fellow District Judge Frank R. Zapata worked with Marquez for many years, first as a defense attorney trying cases before him and later as a magistrate and judge. He said Marquez’s own experiences guided him in his judicial career.
“He understood the strife that people went through,” Zapata said.
Marquez often spoke of his experience of growing up in a region where segregation was the rule.
In his youth, Winkelman was not segregated, but neighboring Hayden was. Marquez attended high school in Hayden, then a company town of the magnate that ran the copper mine, and often spoke of how Latinos were relegated to living outside the town.
The town’s movie theater also was segregated, which Rothschild said was something Marquez spoke of often.
Those early experiences likely informed Marquez’s views on fairness and justice while serving on the federal bench.
For instance, Marquez was an early critic of the sentencing guidelines lawmakers set.
“Judge Marquez always thought the sentencing guidelines were too stiff for the little guys and not stiff enough for the big guys,” Rothschild said.
Federal lawmakers established the guidelines in 1984, which later would become the cause of some controversy.
In particular, critics decried the disparities in sentences given for crack cocaine offenses versus powdered cocaine. At the time, crack cocaine was found primarily among minority communities, while powdered cocaine was more prevalent among whites.
During his time on the bench, Marquez ruled on numerous landmark cases, including the Tucson Unified School District desegregation case, pygmy owl litigation, the Mount Graham red squirrel issue and the suit over the state’s funding of English-language-learning programs in public schools.
Zapata said despite the controversies of a case, Marquez was not influenced by politics or criticisms.
“To him, if it was just it had to be decided that way; if it was right it had to be decided that way,” Zapata said.
